The Shalotten Shammos sceptically passed a pear to his son.  Old Gabriel Hamburg, the scholar, came compassionately to the raconteur’s assistance.

“Rabbi Solomon Maimon,” he said, “has left it on record that he witnessed a similar funeral in Posen.”

“It was well she buried it,” said Karlkammer.  “It was an atonement for a child, and saved its life.”

The Shalotten Shammos laughed outright.

“Ah, laugh not,” said Mrs. Belcovitch.  “Or you might laugh with blood.  It isn’t for my own sins that I was born with ill-matched legs.”

“I must laugh when I hear of God’s fools burying fish anywhere but in their stomach,” said the Shalotten Shammos, transporting a Brazil nut to the rear, where it was quickly annexed by Solomon Ansell, who had sneaked in uninvited and ousted the other boy from his coign of vantage.

The conversation was becoming heated; Breckeloff turned the topic.

“My sister has married a man who can’t play cards,” he said lugubriously.

“How lucky for her,” answered several voices.

“No, it’s just her black luck,” he rejoined.  “For he will play.”

There was a burst of laughter and then the company remembered that Breckeloff was a Badchan or jester.

“Why, your sister’s husband is a splendid player,” said Sugarman with a flash of memory, and the company laughed afresh.

“Yes,” said Breckeloff.  “But he doesn’t give me the chance of losing to him now, he’s got such a stuck-up Kotzon.  He belongs to Duke’s Plaizer Shool and comes there very late, and when you ask him his birthplace he forgets he was a Pullack and says becomes from ‘behind Berlin.’”

These strokes of true satire occasioned more merriment and were worth a biscuit to Solomon Ansell vice the son of the Shalotten Shammos.

Among the inoffensive guests were old Gabriel Hamburg, the scholar, and young Joseph Strelitski, the student, who sat together.  On the left of the somewhat seedy Strelitski pretty Bessie in blue silk presided over the coffee-pot.  Nobody knew whence Bessie had stolen her good looks:  probably some remote ancestress!  Bessie was in every way the most agreeable member of the family, inheriting some of her father’s brains, but wisely going for the rest of herself to that remote ancestress.

Gabriel Hamburg and Joseph Strelitski had both had relations with No. 1 Royal Street for some time, yet they had hardly exchanged a word and their meeting at this breakfast table found them as great strangers as though they had never seen each other.  Strelitski came because he boarded with the Sugarmans, and Hamburg came because he sometimes consulted Jonathan Sugarman about a Talmudical passage.  Sugarman was charged with the oral traditions of a chain of Rabbis, like an actor who knows all the “business” elaborated by his predecessors, and even a scientific